Sunday, January 22, 2017

Our Just Desserts

The American Election of 2016 was a Torture devised by the very Devil.

We were offered a “choice” that was no choice at all, between a Warmongering Tool of Wall Street on the one hand (Clinton, the Ultimate Insider) and a Pompous Blowhard on the other, whose candidacy and subsequent election can only be described as the Biggest Public Masturbation of All Time.

There’s no doubt in my mind that we were screwed either way: still America surprised me when it bought into The Don’s 100 Percent Substance-Free Campaign, the mere phrase “Make America Great Again” proving enough to win the empty minds of those who were unwilling to ask just exactly what that meant.

In the weeks leading up to the election, I kept wracking my brain, wondering how it came to this. Then I looked closely at Trump’s competition for the Republican nomination, and realized that he had chosen the Best Possible Year to run. Between nincompoops like Ben Carson, political gangsters like Chris Christie, and Out-and-Out Freaky Reactionary Whack Jobs like Ted Cruz, the only serious competition Trump had for the nomination came from Jeb Bush — and Jeb was out early, because nobody in the world, not even the Republicans, wanted another god damn Bush in the White House.

Stand those 16 candidates side by side, and suddenly it becomes obvious that the nomination was The Don’s to lose. Incredible as it was, incredible as he is, at least he was famous: the masses could point at him and say, “I seen him on the tee-vee!” It was THE APPRENTICE that got Donald Trump elected, more than anything else.

Having won the nomination, still he should have been easy to defeat. But the DNC, in a naked demonstration that corruption is not the exclusive domain of Republicans, torpedoed the candidate who was the Democratic electorate’s clear preferred choice (anyone who attended a caucus, as I did, can tell you that Bernie Sanders had far more support from the voters). In their most colossally stupid move since Michael Dukakis, they installed the Washington Insider who manipulated her way into the position with the support of a shrill minority in the party.

And they did it in a year when nobody wanted a Washington Insider for President. Beyond that shrill minority of Democrats, nobody wanted another Clinton in the White House, for the same exact reasons that they didn’t want another god damn Bush in there. Hillary Clinton was never going to win this election. By nominating Clinton over Sanders, the DNC handed the White House to Donald “My Dick is SO BIG NOW” Trump on a silver platter.

But in 2016, to be a Democrat and to oppose Hillary Clinton was to put yourself in a very uncomfortable position. There is no more intolerant creature on Earth than a certain species of Democrat who fancies themselves as being Holier and More Righteous than anyone, thank you very much. The Legion of Hillaries, people so devoted to the candidacy of Clinton that they regarded any failure to fall in line behind her as The Ultimate Betrayal, mirrored the DNC brass by doing everything in their power to silence those of us who believed and believe that Secretary Clinton would have been almost as disastrous a presidential choice as The Don.

In 2016, The United States of America got the election results that they deserved, because from the very beginning, from top to bottom and from both ends of the political spectrum, the American People allowed Stupidity to Reign Supreme.

And now — instead of acknowledging its own culpability and re-organizing, refocussing to flip Congress two years from now and to make The Don a one-term Office Holder (I will never call him the P-word), the DNC is flailing about, pointing fingers, blaming Russia for exposing the things that it shouldn’t ought to have been doing in the first place. They have — at most — a year to get their act together. I despair of their ability to manage it.